This month something happened to me that had never happened before. Absolutely unprecedented. "Infinitely" is one of our most abused adverbs, almost infinitely overused. But in this case it may be accurate to say that what happened to me is infinitely preferable to the alternative. I turned 75.

This happened...

On Christmas Eve 1973, Bert Schneider, the richly innovative Hollywood producer who died this month, decreed a screening of what eventually became my film on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds. We had been in the editing room for six months, at which point an executive on a fiction film...